Johnny Thomson 00:01
Now, you may not realise it, but there is a strong chance that something is hidden close to a village hall near you and quite a few people are probably looking for it. Hi everyone, I’m Johnny Thomson and welcome once again to The Village Halls Podcast sponsored by Allied Westminster, the UK’s largest specialist provider of village hall insurance and the home of VillageGuard. The mysterious world of geocaching is something I only came across recently, thanks to social media and one person in particular who has a real passion for it. And I’m delighted to say I’ve been joined by that person today, Jackie O’Halloran, who not only loves geocaching, but is also rather fond of village halls too. And we’ll get on to explain how she’s been connecting the two very soon, but for now… Hi Jackie, and welcome to the show.

Jackie O’Halloran 00:58
Hi, Johnny, thanks for having me.

Johnny Thomson 01:00
It’s a pleasure. Now, Jackie let’s begin by helping anyone out there who’s never actually heard of geocaching before. Tell me what it is and how you originally came across it yourself?

Jackie O’Halloran 01:13
Well, I first came across it back in 2010. It was actually a friend put something on Facebook and I thought, ooh what’s that? And I was told it was a great thing, getting out walking, finding hidden treasures on a treasure hunt, which you can use a GPS or phone for. Found it great and a great way of getting my children out walking. So, we went out and we found some and thoroughly enjoyed it. As the children got older, they lost interest, but I carried on and I got hooked.

Johnny Thomson 01:46
Yeah, brilliant. And presumably when you say GPS, you have to use coordinates or something like that and that kind of helps you locate whatever it is that you’re looking for, yeah?

Jackie O’Halloran 01:56
That’s right, yeah. The coordinates are published of where you’re going to find the geocache and you would then use either a GPS device, or nowadays there are phone apps, which make it a lot easier, and you follow that until you get close to the location of the geocache. And then there’s usually a hint on the page, which will narrow it down a little bit more, to help you find it.

Johnny Thomson 02:22
And when you see a geocache, what is the treasure that you’re hunting for?

Jackie O’Halloran 02:28
Well they can really be very varied You get large ones, which are sort of maybe the size of a bucket, quite often, maybe a Tupperware container, or sometimes an army ammo can. And you also get very tiny little ones, size of a thimble. And they would tend to be magnetic so they might be on the back of a road sign or something like that. There are also some disguised ones, which are quite sneaky. So it could look like a stone or it could look like a snail, various different ones. Hard to notice what it is, you know, very easily you’d think it’s something else. But they are actually geocaches. The larger ones have trinkets inside them. And the idea is that you put something in and you take something out. And that’s the great thing for the kids. Because obviously for them, that’s the treasure hunting.But they all have a logbook, and you sign your logbook when you’ve actually found it.

Johnny Thomson 03:20
So these are kind of everyday objects then that you would swap over and you would put in, just to help me understand, into the box or whatever?

Jackie O’Halloran 03:27
Yeah. They are often things, just small things like maybe little bouncy balls, or rubbers or the type of things that you might get in a child’s party bag. So not of a great value.

Johnny Thomson 03:41
Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s not the value of the object, it’s just the finding it it’s the whole kind of seeking something down. As you say treasure hunt is the perfect way of describing, isn’t it? That’s what the activity is all about is finding something that’s otherwise hidden.

Jackie O’Halloran 03:57
Exactly. Yes.

Johnny Thomson 03:58
Jackie, what do you do for a living when you’re not chasing around the country looking for hidden things?

Jackie O’Halloran 04:05
Well, I work for the NHS, but on days off when I’m not working, you know, I really enjoy walking and things and that’s where geocaching fits in well, because it’s a real great way of going out for a walk, but having something else to do and it takes you to places that maybe you wouldn’t know about, but because there’s a geocache there you go there and you suddenly find this great view, this history of somewhere that you wouldn’t have come across.

Johnny Thomson 04:34
Yeah, just want to say thanks for your contribution as well. I think you know, anyone works with the NHS, we we should continue to say thank you to so…

Jackie O’Halloran 04:43
Oh thank you very much.

Johnny Thomson 04:46
And yeah, you mentioned the attraction of this, why do people get so hooked on this do you think?

Jackie O’Halloran 04:52
It can become very addictive, as I’ve found out myself. On the map, you have a map of maybe a local area and it shows where all the geocaches are. When you’ve found one, they turn from a little green box into a smiley face. And it becomes very addictive actually wanting all your map to turn into smiley faces. So you want to go out and find more to get a map full of smiley faces.

Johnny Thomson 05:23
Yeah, it’s almost like those old fashioned sticker albums where once you start collecting one or two, you’re completely hooked and you’re not satisfied until you’ve filled the page and then filled the book.

Jackie O’Halloran 05:33
Exactly, yes.

Johnny Thomson 05:35
Yeah, no, I can, I can understand it. And of course, you’re not the only one out there, are you judging by the sheer number of geocaches that are hidden across the world, actually. How many are there Jackie?

Jackie O’Halloran 05:50
Well, at the moment, there are about 3,300,000 geocaches across the world. That obviously goes up and down from time to time, but as a rough ball ballpark, that’s how many. They’re in 250 different countries and all continents of the world have got them.

Johnny Thomson 06:12
Yeah, so literally you could travel anywhere in the world and you can start looking for a geocache?

Jackie O’Halloran 06:17
You could, most definitely, and I have done that myself. In the UK, I was going say, in the UK alone there are over 200,000 in the UK. So very often, they will be very close to where people might be.

Johnny Thomson 06:32
Yeah, absolutely wherever you are there’s going to be something nearby. When did this geocaching become a thing then Jackie, how long has this been around?

Jackie O’Halloran 06:42
Well it very first started in May 2000. And there was a significant event that happened then that restrictions on satellite reception were actually turned off. And at that point, it meant that the public could then use GPS receivers and actually get an accurate location on them. So when they were turned off on 2nd May and became public, the day after, there was a chap called Dave Ulmer, and he was a computer consultant, and lived in Oregon in USA. And he had a GPS and he decided that he was going to test to see just how good this accuracy was. He went out with a bucket full of items, hid it out in the country somewhere and posted on the internet on a GPS user’s internet group, the coordinates of it and said come and find it. He wasn’t sure whether anybody would but they did. Actually, within the first three days, it got found twice. And quickly, other people kind of caught on to this and started hiding their own ones. And it only took a month and the first one was hidden in the UK. So on 6th June, we had our first one here.

Johnny Thomson 08:05
Wonderful and here we are 21 years later and there’s millions all over the world.

Jackie O’Halloran 08:10
And now obviously it’s run with a proper website to find them, there’s geocaching apps and things like that. At that time, it was just online posts where people were posting coordinates online. The first guy that actually found Dave Ulmer’s cache was the one that did actually start up. He started picking up all the different online posts where people had put them and put them together on his personal homepage. And that was the the forerunner of the geocaching website where actually people could find them all in one place.

Johnny Thomson 08:43
Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, you’re also a fan of village halls. In fact, you’re a committee member of one, is that right?

Jackie O’Halloran 08:50
I am yes, I’m on the management committee at Denmead War Memorial Hall, which is on the south coast.

Johnny Thomson 08:57
Brilliant. And that connection with a hall actually started something else didn’t it, something you’ve called The Village Hall Series. So tell me about that and how that in itself has also grown?

Jackie O’Halloran 09:11
Well it started back in 2013. And I’d already been into geocaching, but I decided that I would like to put one at the hall where I’m a committee member for people to come and find, to highlight the hall, talk about the history and why it was there. Obviously as a Memorial Hall you know, we’ve got the history of why it was built for you know, in remembrance of the people that died in the war. So I placed a cache there and it was very popular, a lot people came to it, and I then thought maybe I should place some at a few other local halls. So, the halls within a few miles of where I live I placed a few more and I started numbering them. But obviously, I couldn’t go much further because I’d need to be within a certain area where I can keep an eye on them to maintain the geocaches and things. So I then asked other people, other geocachers, if they wanted to place one at a village hall then I would give them a number, they could place it a hall close to them, but I would keep a record of which hall had which number, which I did, and it started spreading.

Johnny Thomson 10:23
So, how many village or community halls across the country now have a have a geocache either on site or let’s say, quite close by.

Jackie O’Halloran 10:32
So at the moment, we’re up to 1,300 or just over 1,300 village halls. There’s also community centres as well, so I say any place that has a hall which is open for the public to book for functions and things. So it can’t be a private member’s club or things it is a village hall type hall. And yeah, we’re in 61 different counties of England, Scotland, Wales, we’ve got some on the Channel Islands and also Isle of Man. So it’s, it’s spread so much more than I ever imagined, you know, I thought at first it would be a few just close to my home. Yes, takes up quite a bit of my time now just organising and sending out numbers to people as I’m constantly getting requests for new ones.

Johnny Thomson 11:21
It’s a good thing you didn’t have to put all 1,300 there yourself otherwise it would have taken up all of your time wouldn’t it? OK, give me a few interesting examples Jackie of village hall geocaches, you know without necessarily given the location away, of course, because we don’t want to spoil things for anyone. But give me a few interesting examples of of the kind of places they get hidden.

Jackie O’Halloran 11:26
Exactly. Okay, well they’re not all actually on the premises. If they are on the premises, we will always ask the hall committee if we are allowed to place it there. So some will be on the premises because either the hall committee, which we have got a few hall committees that have placed them themselves, or the local geocacher has asked permission to put them on there. If not, it may well be that the geocache will be placed just outside, so it’s in sight of the hall, or slightly further afield and there would be a bit of a puzzle that they would have to go to, to solve, to find where it is. And at village halls there’s always lots of different number of things. There’s signposts with telephone numbers, contact telephone numbers, defibrillators always have a number on them. So those things are really very useful. So they might say, find the number that’s on the defibrillator and you use that to work out the coordinates of where the geocache is, but it’s taken them to the village hall first before they’ve gone out. We’ve got a few that are at halls, key safes which are quite good. So they’re placed… the hall have allowed us to put up one of the digital key safes we set a number to it, and it means that when they get there, they have to work out what the number is to open it and the geocache logbook and things will be inside it.

Johnny Thomson 13:08
Statistics seem to play quite an important part here as well, because I understand things can get a bit competitive in the world of of geocaching as well. So, I’m interested to know how many overall Jackie you’ve found and how many you’ve actually hidden?

Jackie O’Halloran 13:25
Yes, it does get very competitive. People always like to sort of see if they can get to certain challenges and things like that. So since I’ve been doing I’ve found 8,700 geocaches and I’ve placed 192 for others to find

Johnny Thomson 13:46
I don’t know how you can do that many days out.

Jackie O’Halloran 13:49
It’s been over quite a quite a period of time, but I have had some times when we’ve done big days. You know I’ve gone away with friends, which is my preferred way of doing it. Although I do geocache on my own. I like it as a social event. So I’ll go out with a group of friends or one or two friends and we’ll go out geocaching together, and we’ve had some weekends away and things where we’ve gone out just purely to find geocaches. Of those finds that I’ve found, 650 village halls I’ve visited and found, so of our 1,300 I found 650. So, I’ve still got a few more to find yet. I’m not the top though.

Johnny Thomson 14:29
You’re not the top?

Jackie O’Halloran 14:30
No I’m not the top, there’s a few above me .The guy that’s found the most village hall geocaches at the moment,he’s found 902 of them. And he’s very competitive, doesn’t want anybody else to get anywhere near him. So if anyone starts getting near him, he’ll go out and do a big day of village hall caches to make sure he keeps at the top of those stats.

Johnny Thomson 14:52
Well there’s a challenge for everybody listening. You know that we’re really laying down the gauntlet. I mean 900 is going to take some catching up I would think. But if there are any competitive listeners out there, you’ve been set the standard and that’s the one to go for, for me. And I’m right in thinking that geocaching hasn’t just taken you around the country either has it? You’ve gone to other parts of the world too, this is not just in the UK that you’ve done all this all the finding?

Jackie O’Halloran 15:19
No, it’s not no. I’ve been fortunate enough before COVID to have been travelling to various different countries. And when I go somewhere, I always like to find some geocaches there in another country. So at the moment, I’ve found them in 12 different countries. And within the UK, again on our maps and the Geocaching website, it shows you how many counties you’ve been to. So a lot of people try and fill off and find all the counties, find geocaches in all the different counties. So I’ve found 54 counties in the UK. So again, still a fair few more to go. I’m getting there

Johnny Thomson 15:56
Which one stands out when you think of the overseas ones that you found?

Jackie O’Halloran 16:00
New Zealand?

Johnny Thomson 16:02
Yeah.

Jackie O’Halloran 16:04
Without a doubt,

Johnny Thomson 16:04
That’s quite a long way away and spectacular as well!

Jackie O’Halloran 16:07
Absolutely beautiful country and some fantastic geocaches in the most gorgeous locations. So yeah, definitely New Zealand.

Johnny Thomson 16:16
Brilliant. Now obviously you’re able to wear a village hall committee member hat too. So, tell me with both of your hats on why you think village halls make such good locations for geocaches.

Jackie O’Halloran 16:30
Well they’re interesting locations and they’re so different. You get anything from old thatched roof halls, listed buildings. So the green tin huts, which actually I really love, and then really very modern ones. So there’s always something very different. And it brings people with an interest. There’s usually a backstory to why the hall was built or who built it. When we write up the page for geocachers to come, there’s a lot of information that’s put so the person that will put the geocache will find out a bit about the history, what’s going on at the hall, activities that they’re doing there. And they’ll write it all in the description, which in turn is great for the halls and for the local communities, because it’s giving them a little bit of advertising, making people aware of a hall and what goes on there. They take photos as well when they visit. They’ll very often take photographs of the hall, which they’ll then post with their logs. And another great thing is if we have social events, which we do like to have and we have quite regularly, village halls make great places for us to have that tea and cake afternoons in a village hall. Geocachers favourites!

Johnny Thomson 17:42
Nothing better.

Jackie O’Halloran 17:44
And of course, if there’s a geocache at that same hall so they can have tea and cake and find a geocache, it’s perfect.

Johnny Thomson 17:52
The very best of both worlds.

Jackie O’Halloran 17:54
Exactly.

Johnny Thomson 17:57
Yeah it’s a great way of just attracting a different kind of visitor and different audience. And so how can halls get involved in some way in this strange and mysterious and almost secret world? Until recently for me of geocaching?

Jackie O’Halloran 18:16
Well, first of all, I mean, it’s great that people may now know what it is. So if they have a geocacher that comes to them and says, can I place a geocache, then they’ll know a little bit about it and what you know what it can do to them and how it can get people aware of their hall.

Johnny Thomson 18:33
Definitely.

Jackie O’Halloran 18:34
As I say, we have had some hall committees that have decided that they would like to place one themselves within the hall. There is obviously a process to go through to do that, to write up the geocaching page and things. And most of the hall committees that I’ve worked with have done it, haven’t had much experience in themselves in geocaching, although sometimes they’ve had a committee member that may have done it a little bit. So they know a bit about it. But I’ve been able to work with them to help them write their pages and give them advice on the best places to hide them or what it should look like, things like that. So if anybody decides that they would like to have one, they can always contact me and I can kind of talk them through the process of how to do it.

Johnny Thomson 19:19
And I know you’re on social media, because as I said at the beginning, that’s kind of how we initially connected. But you’ve got you’ve got a Facebook page, Instagram and do you have a website as well Jackie?

Jackie O’Halloran 19:30
Yeah, I do have a website. It’s villagehallseries.wixsite.com.

Johnny Thomson 19:39
Brilliant. So your quite happy for people to find out a bit more information that way and to get in touch as well?

Jackie O’Halloran 19:46
Exactly. And on there there’s a contact form that they can get in contact with me. But it’s a good way also, if somebody wants to know a little bit more, go on that and just have a read of about what we’ve done. And there’s some pictures and information. There’s statistics on there of what people have found. So it might be an interesting, interesting read.

Johnny Thomson 20:09
Brilliant Jackie, well listen the whole thing for me, I’ve found it really fascinating. I still haven’t completely made my mind up whether you’re all a bit mad, or if I should have a go myself, to be honest, I’m kind of torn between the two.

Jackie O’Halloran 20:25
I think you’re right in both of those, we probably are all a little bit mad! But also, you should definitely have a go at it. You never know you might end up getting addicted as well.

Johnny Thomson 20:35
Well that’s the worry isn’t it? Almost it’s a kind of worrying thing that one of those things, once you start, you definitely won’t be able to, to stop. But it’s great. It’s obviously given you a huge amount of pleasure over the last several years. And no it’s wonderful. And thank you so much for coming on and for starting up The Village Hall Series as well. That sounds to me like a great way also to record the presence of these great institutions that we have here in the UK. And I don’t really think you’re mad, by the way. I think it’s all wonderful. A great way of getting out and about, as you said earlier and exploring the great British countryside as well of course.

Jackie O’Halloran 21:19
Most definitely it is and who knows how many, I mean there’s obviously a lot more village halls out there. So how many it will go on to to get to I don’t know, but at the moment, there’s no stopping. People are asking for different different halls.

Johnny Thomson 21:35
Yeah, I think there’s about 10,000 isn’t there across the UK. So yeah, still some still some way to go. So if we can encourage a few more halls to get involved and also a few more people to get involved in geocaching as well at the same time, I think that’d be great.

Jackie O’Halloran 21:50
Yeah, no, it will be definitely.

Johnny Thomson 21:52
Well thanks again Jackie for for coming on.

Jackie O’Halloran 21:54
Thank you very much for having me.

Johnny Thomson 21:56
It’s been a pleasure. And that’s it for us for this episode. Other than for me to once again mention our Wonderful Villages Awards. There’s five awards all together, including an Innovation Award and an Unsung Hero or Heroes Award and you could win £1,000 for your local village, church or community hall. So please mention that one to your fellow committee members as well Jackie. You can find out more about The Wonderful Villages Awards on our website. Many thanks to our headline sponsor and specialist insurance provider Allied Westminster for making our podcast possible, and whose services you can discover more about at villageguard.com. And to online booking system provider Hallmaster who also sponsor our podcast and can be found at hallmaster.co.uk. You’ve been listening to The Village Halls Podcast, a unique listening community for Britain’s village, church and community halls, and anyone interested in the vital community services they provide. We’ll be back again soon with another episode, so please visit thevillagehallspodcast.com to subscribe, sign up for updates, link through to our social media pages and to find out more. But until next time, goodbye for now.